Don’t Put [insert name of object here] In Your Butt

The Dumb S**t People Don't Know About Sex Issue

As I promised myself, I metaphorically buried my head in the sand while I was on vacation. I didn’t miss the big stories like the fires in Hawaii (devastating), the vote in Ohio (promising), or the indictment in Georgia (not as much fun as I’d expected), but I didn’t check my newsfeed until I got home. It’s only been three weeks so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it was all the same old stuff: legislatures across the country are still attacking trans people, banning books, and silencing teachers, and people still know woefully little about sex and their bodies. There was so much “that’s not how it f**king works” fodder, it was a little overwhelming. 

One misinformation-themed story that appeared in multiple outlets sounds funny, but if it’s true (there are red flags), it’s actually quite sad. The story, which apparently comes from an obstetrician in the Guizhou Province of China, is of a young married couple (24 and 26) who said they’d been having sex regularly in the hopes of getting pregnant. It had been four years without success, and they were turning to the OB for help. They seemed healthy, so the doctor “…. ran some tests, only for them to reveal something far more shocking: The woman was a ‘virgin.’”

(Side note: virginity is a social construct and there’s no blood draw or swab that could detect it. While it’s possible that the doctor saw an intact hymen during examination, it seems unlikely as some women are born without this thin piece of skin that covers the vaginal opening and many/most others break it doing something other than having sex like exercising or putting in a tampon).

The doctor then examined that woman’s anus and found that the couple had indeed been putting it in the wrong hole. To take liberties with my own favorite phrase, that’s not how f**king works (at least not if you’re doing it for procreative purposes).

Of course, I question whether this whole story is apocryphal. It was all over my news feed this week, including the article I quoted from the New York Post, but a quick google search found that the same story—down to the ages of the patients and the name of the doctor—was all over the news in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Snopes checked it out in 2018, and while it seems to have run in a legitimate Chinese newspaper that year, even many who read the original did not believe it was real. One reader posted a comment saying, “This story is intended to degrade rural people. Although some young people today come from rural areas, they are not ignorant to this degree.”

That sounds about right and is sad in a different way. If the story were true, I would not blame the couple or make fun of them; I would blame societal taboos against talking about sex, teaching about sex, and touching one’s own body. Yes, inserting tab A into slot B is relatively intuitive as proven by the fact that humankind has survived this long. Still, people need basic facts about their bodies and permission to explore them, all of which should be given long before anyone is married and/or trying to become a parent themself.

Normally, I wouldn’t even tell you a story of such dubious origin, but as I said, many of the other stories in my backlog were about current attempts in this country to keep people ignorant by stripping all classes and libraries of information about sex and reinstating the Comstock laws. There were also plenty of stories about things people should know but don’t and things they think are true but aren’t. So, I decided to dedicate this first issue back from vacation to—for lack of a better phrase—dumb s**t people don’t know about sex.

Nope, Birth Control Doesn’t Make You Infertile

This was just one of the kernels of health misinformation that KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) asked about in a new survey of over 2,000 adults across the country. The survey focused on three public health issues—Covid-19/vaccines, sexual health, and gun violence. It found that few people are entirely bought in to some of the Republican talking points crazier ideas that have been floating around in recent years, but a lot of people believe that they maybe, possibly, could be true.

Here are some of the results (image from KFF, see it full size on their site):

As a glass half-empty kind of gal, I look at this and think it’s crazy that 69% of respondents think it’s even possible that thousands of healthy people died from the Covid vaccine or that 70% of people might still believe that sex ed turns kids into sluts. But I’m trying to have a rosier outlook post-vacation, and it’s nice to know that less than 10% of people are fully bought into Ivermectin as a treatment for anything other than mangy foxes or the MMR shot as the cause of Autism. That means there are a lot of people in the mushy, moldable middle that we might be able to reach with real facts. 

Unfortunately, the first step is probably to get them to stop watching Fox News and believing anything they see on X. (I can’t believe I’m calling it that, who changes the name of a product with so much market recognition that it practically changed the definition of a word?)  The survey found that while less than half (45%) of respondents had heard and possibly believed one of the five false COVID-19/vaccine claims, that share rises to 76% of regular Newsmax viewers, 67% of regular OANN viewers, and 61% of regular Fox News viewers. Similarly, 54% of those who use social media for health information had heard and kind of sorta believed one of these claims compared to only 40% of those who don’t use social media for health advice. (Pro tip: don’t use social media for health advice.)

The next step in that mushy middle—which includes people who think the nugget of misinformation is probably true and those who think it’s probably false—would be to find ways to communicate actual facts to them. The survey found that most people trust their own doctors (93%). Surprisingly, even post-pandemic, many people trust federal agencies with 67% saying they trust the CDC and 65% saying they trust the FDA. Not surprisingly, more Democrats than Republicans trusted either. Lots of people continue to trust traditional news sources. Local news wins with the trust of 80% of respondents, while national network news and local papers tied with 72% citing them as trustworthy. Among cable news networks, CNN is the most trusted besting Fox 58% to 49% though few respondents (less than 3 in 10) really trusted any of the news outlets as sources for health information.

Perhaps because they’re not reading Sex on Wednesday?

Bee Pollen Won’t Get You to a B-Cup (or a DD)

I am from the Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret generation that rowed our folded arms forwards and back repeating “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” in a middle school effort to get bigger boobs. (I didn’t see the movie, but my own middle schooler went with a friend and found this boob-growing version of the Chicken Dance highly amusing). Today’s young people, however, are learning more from TikTok than Judy Blume and have decided the best way to get to the next cup size is to take bee pollen supplements.   

That’s right—this story really is about the birds and the bees.

I’m not an expert in actual bees, but a I do know a one-eyed beekeeper in Massachusetts (no, it wasn’t the bees), and he actually called me while I was writing this article. Between his expertise and Wikipedia, here’s what I’ve learned. Forager bees leave the hive to collect pollen from flowers. They bring some of the powder back and give it to worker bees who then pack it into the little cells in the hive using their heads. During either the collection or packing phase (or possibly both), the bees mix their own nectar and saliva into the pollen which is why you often see bee pollen as little pellets. Bee pollen contain sugars, proteins, minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and fatty acids, and serves as food for the bees. It is not part of the honey-making process.

Bee pollen has been made into nutritional supplements for years (my beekeeping buddy assures me that we can harvest the pollen without harming any bees). It has been marketed with promises that it will give you energy, fix your stomach, enhance your athletic performance, and help your prostate. Not surprisingly, there is very little research to suggest that it does any of these things.

It's not clear when breast enhancement was added to the list, but it has gotten a lot of attention on TikTok in recent months. The hashtag #beepollenboobgrowth has over 15 million views, and many TikTokers swear they can see a difference in how their shirts fit.

Experts aren’t convinced, though they do admit there’s a theoretical explanation that could make this phenomenon possible. Bee pollen could contain phytoestrogen—estrogen-like compounds derived from plants. Actual estrogen plays a role in breast size during puberty and beyond as breast size changes slightly over the course of the menstrual cycle. Breasts tend to be bigger, though not necessarily noticeably so, in the weeks between ovulation and menstruation. If the body reacts to the plant-estrogen in the bee pollen in the same way that it reacts to its own estrogen, one might notice a slight increase in boob size.

Again, there is no research proving this is true, and a few TikToks with people in push-up bras does not constitute science. Moreover, even if it works, the benefits would be temporary: as soon as the phytoestrogen made it through your system, things would start to shrink.

Like with any supplement, there are also risks. Vitamins and supplements are largely unregulated, so there could be other, less-natural things in your package of bee pollen. You could also have a reaction to the bees involved (people allergic to bee stings shouldn’t use this) or be exposed to whatever toxins the bees were exposed to (think insecticides). Bee pollen is known to interact with the medication warfarin (an anti-clotting drug) and may interact with other medication. Also, pregnant women should not take bee pollen because it may cause uterine contractions.

A few weeks ago, I talked about the lengths men will go to to get bigger penises and now we’re talking about the desire for bigger boobs. I will say something similar to what I said then; I wish women and young girls were happy in the bodies they had and didn’t feel like they had to “measure up” to their best friend or a swimsuit model, but I understand the cultural conditioning that might make someone consider a boob job or look for other ways to fill a sweater. It sounds like using bee pollen to get a C-cup is one of the safer and least invasive ways to do this, though possibly not one of the most effective.

So, TikTokers, go ahead, just bee careful.

Don’t Put [insert name of object here] In Your Butt

In the past, I have shared annual lists that I like to call “what we’re sticking up our butts this year.” I haven’t seen one for 2022 or 2023, but a recent article in the Journal of Emergency Medicine provides some good data on how often people end up in the hospital because they shoved a sex toy or toothbrush or aerosol can into their ass and can’t get it out.

The article found an estimated 38,948 emergency department visits for “rectal foreign bodies” between 2012 and 2021. Most of the patients (77%) were male, the average age was 43, and less than half of them needed hospitalization.

The research also found that 55% of foreign bodies were sex toys, which I originally found reassuring because at least the genre was on target. But then I read this: “…compared to sexual devices, balls/marbles or drugs/paraphernalia are associated with reduced odds of hospitalization.” I’m not a colorectal surgeon (which I think of as proctology rebranded) and I have no idea what kind of drug paraphernalia is most often found up the butt, but I’m going to guess that these objects are smaller than sex toys and thus easier to remove without surgery.

What I do know for sure as a sex educator is that no one should stick anything up their ass that doesn’t have a base that stays outside. Penises are attached to pelvises. Fingers are attached to hands. Fists are attached to arms. These things can’t get lost. But dildos, vibrators, cucumbers, bottles, and the numerous other phallic-shaped household items that have been fetched from anuses over the centuries (the earliest reports of rectal foreign bodies date back to the 1500s) can.

There are tons of sex toys on the market that have been designed for anal play. Whether you’re talking about a vibrating butt plug or a set of anal beads, what these products have in common is an anchor or flared base that stays outside the body. To be safe, stick with these when you’re sticking anything up there.